National Politics: Democratic Primaries and Convention 1972

NATIONAL POLITICS: DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES AND CONVENTION 1972

Democratic Primaries

As the primary season began, the two front-runners for the nomination were both conservatives: George Wallace, governor of Alabama, and Edmund Muskie, senator from Maine. Wallace had made his national reputation in the early 1960s as a prosegregationist. By 1972 his position had modified somewhat, and he campaigned on an anticrime, antibusing, populist platform that had immediate appeal for millions of conservative, blue-collar Democrats. Muskie's reputation was that of a statesmanlike, prudent politician. The favorite of Democratic party bosses, Muskie did not possess the natural constituency of Wallace but did carry considerable financial and organizational clout.

Dirty Trcks

Unknown to the Democrats, President Nixon's campaign utilized illegal and unethical tactics to defeat them. Led by Donald Segretti and Chapin, CREEP developed a dirty-tricks campaign to undermine the Democrats. They spent four hundred thousand dollars during the 1970 Democratic gubernatorial primary in Alabama in an attempt to defeat Wallace. Nixon also had Wallace investigated by the IRS in an attempt to derail his candidacy. CREEP monitored Muskie's private conversations and leaked them to the press. They attempted to wiretap Sen. George McGovern and Democratic National Committee chairman O'Brien. CREEP hired twenty-eight people in seventeen states to forge letters using Democratic candidates' letterheads, produce phony letters to newspapers, leak false statements, concoct rumors, cancel and switch appearances, and make incendiary phone calls in the middle of the night to supporters. The dirty tricks did not, by themselves, defeat any of the Democratic candidates. They did, however, create an atmosphere of discord among the Democrats and disconcert the candidates. CREEP sharply increased the normal pressures and competition of campaigning.

ADMIRAL TURNER SHAKES UP
THE CIA

After congressionally based investigations revealed widespread abuse of power—assassinations, domestic surveillance in violation of its charter—on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency, President Jimmy Carter made reforming the agency a priority. Carter gave Adm. Stansfield Turner, commander of the Second Fleet in the Atlantic, the job of bringing the CIA under control. Turner certainly shook things up. He eliminated 212 jobs in the Directorate of Operations, dismissed 820 operatives, reinforced congressional mandates limiting the activities of agents, and re-organized the secret budgets not only of the CIA, but of eight other intelligence-gathering agencies, as well. The changes had the intended effect of streamlining the CIA, but they also generated resentment and criticism—especially of Turner, noted for his brusque and uncompromising demeanor. Turner's response was characteristically blunt: "I intend to keep on with this program."

Source:

Time, 111 (6 February 1978): 10-18.

Muskie Defeated

The dirty-tricks campaign was especially effective against Muskie. Nixon feared the Maine senator might well beat him. National polls in the previous year often indicated voter support for Muskie; CREEP did their best to defeat him in the Democratic primaries so that Nixon would face a less formidable challenger in the general election. Muskie was expected to win in New Hampshire, a state next to his own, and he did, but not by an impressive margin. CREEP had circulated rumors concerning Muskie and disparaging remarks about Americans of French-Canadian descent (a large number of whom lived in New Hampshire). The rumors were published in the conservative Manchester newspaper Union Leader, along with an unflattering article about Muskie's wife. Muskie, angered by the articles, attacked the editor of the Union Leader on national television and appeared to cry, undermining his statesmanlike reputation. In the next primary, in Florida, CREEP stepped up its anti-Muskie activities. It circulated leaflets with racial and sexual slurs about the other Democratic candidates and attributed the leaflets to the Muskie campaign; it stole Muskie's mail, planted spies among his staffers, and made and canceled appointments for Muskie. The disruptions worked and embittered relations among the Democratic candidates. Muskie lost Florida, then Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. By the end of April he withdrew from further primaries.

Wallace Shot Down

With Muskie out of the running, Wallace seemed more and more formidable. He won the Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina primaries and finished second in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. He completely eclipsed Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington, running on similar defense issues but with a different social agenda. Jackson soon dropped out of the race. The liberal wing of the Democratic party was troubled by Wallace's surprising popularity and sought to block the possibility that he would become the Democratic standard-bearer in the fall. His candidacy also troubled President Nixon. Nixon was counting on many of the same Democratic, blue-collar voters to endorse Wallace. Should liberal Democrats block Wallace's nomination, Nixon feared that Wallace would run as a third-party candidate in the fall and steal the votes of conservative Democrats from him. The fears of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, however, went unrealized. On 15 May in Laurel, Maryland, Wallace was shot by a would-be assassin. Doctors saved his life, but Wallace was left unable to walk, and his campaign was destroyed.

The Liberal Democrats

With the withdrawal of the conservatives, liberal Democrats moved to the forefront of the primaries. One candidate, former Republican mayor of New York, John Lindsey, had little organizational support within the Democratic party and faded after a poor showing in the Florida primary. Another liberal, Hubert H. Humphrey, the 1968 presidential nominee, carried considerable organizational support, but he was burdened with already having lost to Nixon and inspired little enthusiasm among voters. The most surprising liberal candidate was McGovern, senator from South Dakota. Running almost exclusively on his opposition to the war in Vietnam, McGovern had come in second in New Hampshire. Leaving Florida to Muskie and Wallace, McGovern concentrated his forces in Wisconsin and built an energetic organization populated with young volunteers. Not only did they deliver Wisconsin to McGovern, but the candidate himself proved remarkably popular among blue-collar workers there—people most experts thought would vote for Wallace or Humphrey. McGovern repeated his Wisconsin performance 25 April in Massachusetts, gaining 52 percent of the vote. He also proved shrewd at gaining the votes of convention delegates in nonprimary states. By April the contest was between McGovern and Humphrey.

New Politics versus the Old Guard

From the Ohio to the California primaries, McGovern and Humphrey engaged in the type of intraparty antagonism impossible to heal at the convention. The bloodletting divided and weakened the Democrats, making them an easy mark for Nixon. The issues were fundamentally cultural and generational. McGovern's base of support was among young people and liberals. He banked on the voters brought into the system by the Twenty-sixth Amendment, passed a year earlier, which lowered the voting age to eighteen. In 1972 Americans between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four constituted 20 percent of the population; 25 million of them were eligible to vote. McGovern promised this group not only an end to the war in Vietnam but what he termed a "new politics"—one more responsive to the needs of minorities and women, pacific in foreign policy, and activist on domestic issues. Humphrey found his core constituency among a much different group. He appealed to what remained of the New Deal Democratic coalition: labor unions; urban politicians; and elderly, black, and Jewish voters. Humphrey's core constituency was a generation (or two) removed from the young, and the young derided them as the old guard, the Democrats responsible for Vietnam. Humphrey's supporters similarly viewed McGovern's backers as radicals, anarchists, and hippies out to destroy traditional values. Polarized by these attitudes, Democrats split their votes for the remainder of the primary season: in Ohio Humphrey narrowly defeated McGovern, but in Nebraska McGovern won, 41 percent to 35 percent; in California McGovern won by a slim margin, 44.3 percent to 39.2 percent. The divisiveness of these primary elections set the stage for a volatile national convention.

A Divided Convention

In 1968 the Democrats had also been divided over Vietnam, divided between doves and hawks, the young and the old. There the old guard had triumphed, and their candidate, Humphrey, won the nomination. To placate young Democrats, however, in 1969 the party initiated a reform of its organizational structure, revamping the convention-delegate selection process to open it to new participation. The leader of the reform commission was McGovern. His reforms brought new blood to the party, and at the 1972 convention women and minorities were represented as never before. The old guard was shut out of the platform process, and McGovern got the nomination. Some of the old guard, embittered, bolted the party to join Democrats for halfheartedly for McGovern in the general election. Senator McGovern, who wanted to unify a United States badly divided by Vietnam, could not even bring unity to his own party.

Sources:

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (New York: Warner, 1973);

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1972 (New York: Atheneum, 1973).